a thread for old farts...

[wizard10000]

I found this interesting.

Peter Tattam created Trumpet Winsock - it was shareware and almost nobody paid for it but he enabled millions of people to get on the internet for the very first time.

A couple of people have tracked him down and opened a paypal account for one of the people who made this whole internet thing possible for the masses.

Linkage here -

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2282875

and if you're interested in the /. thread -

http://tech.slashdot.org/story/11/03...e-Little-Money

[ardvark71]

Re: a thread for old farts...

Hi...

Interesting. At that time, I knew very little about computers and didn't even know anything about the internet. The only value I saw in a computer was to play games.

Regards...

[GreyGeek]

Re: a thread for old farts...

When MS finally did include a TCP/IP stack they didn't write one, they "innovated" by taking the BSD stack and compiling it into their kernel. For a long time Windows system directory held the BSD license file. I know it was in Win98, NT and W2K. XP may still have it.

[oshunluvr]

Re: a thread for old farts...

Hey, who you callin' old?

:P

ok, nevermind...

[GreyGeek]

Re: a thread for old farts...

...
The only value I saw in a computer was to play games.
..

Sadly, a LOT of people still hold to that view, and don't realize how much of a role the CPU plays in their lives already, which is still only scratching the surface. As power and speed go up and size and cost comes down, its role in everyday life will continue to grow in leaps and bounds .... if corporate greed and "Intellectual Property" tollbooths don't suck the blood out of it.

[ardvark71]

Re: a thread for old farts...

As power and speed go up and size and cost comes down, its role in everyday life will continue to grow in leaps and bounds ....

Hi GreyGeek...

Good point and I'm wondering at what point in the future it will be extremely hard to live life without a computer, even just for the basics? As one example, I've dealt with two outfits here recently that have offered to transfer folks over to paperless billing. I would expect that trend to continue and at some point in the future, become mandatory.

Regards...

[Ole Juul]

Re: a thread for old farts...

As power and speed go up and size and cost comes down, its role in everyday life will continue to grow in leaps and bounds ....

Hi GreyGeek...

Good point and I'm wondering at what point in the future it will be extremely hard to live life without a computer, even just for the basics? As one example, I've dealt with two outfits here recently that have offered to transfer folks over to paperless billing. I would expect that trend to continue and at some point in the future, become mandatory. .

Certainly digital electronics are quite cheap compared to other solutions. Witness the number of devices in recent years that don't have knobs but rather a keypad which takes commands. This, is more a sign of a poor economy. It's a really cheap way to go. Not even in the electronics world, but the mechanical world, do we see this cheapskate approach. Yes, "computers" in cars can control many variables and give increased fuel economy, but it is also a cheap way to make things work, and not necessarily an improvement in the overall quality.

As for relying on other forms of "computer" use, I am certainly a believer in digital communications. There really are some great benefits in that concept, even though it is not as robust as some older forms. However, when it comes to paperless billing, I am extremely doubtful. There are several reasons that I have doubts. As it stands now, less people use computers than do. That can change, but as we see the distance between rich and poor increasing by the minute, and the completely socially disenfranchised group getting very large, this is not going to work here in North America. I give myself as an example. I cannot have a credit card because I don't make enough money. How would I pay property tax or deal with my hydro bill? Perhaps I would simply be put on the street. Canada already has a social policy of kicking old people out of their homes, so paperless billing would certainly be a good thing for real-estate sharks in that respect.

The other point in regard to paperless billing is there are indeed affordable ways to do this. I forget which African country where they do it now, but they use cell phones and it is cheap. The problem in NA is that the means to do that kind of thing is tied up by current monopolies. Cell phones are basically for the rich and that isn't going to change any time soon. I certainly wouldn't be able to afford one, even if they would work around here. They don't actually work in most places, just in cities, and that is another problem with that system. I think that by the time the technology and politics gets up to snuff, the economy will be so far down that many people won't be able to participate. This will be the downfall of many technological dreams.

[Detonate]

Re: a thread for old farts...

Yes, almost everything is controlled electronically these days, but in certain things I still prefer the old method. A perfect example of this is the climate control in automobiles. In the old days, you had two levers and a four position switch. One lever controlled the temperature and the other let you choose between heater and defrost or any mixture in between. The switch controlled the fan with the four positions being off, low, medium, and high. These were mounted in the center of the dashboard and could be easily controlled without having to take your eyes off the road. Now, you have to push buttons and look down at a display to make adjustments. I much prefer the old way.

[oshunluvr]

Re: a thread for old farts...

I just can't stand it - I have to play devils advocate...

On the other hand(s);

New technologies emerge from the desire to make money (aka "the cheap way to go"). Sometimes an electronic equivalent requires use to learn a new way of doing things and I think there-in lies most of the above complaints.

The automatic climate control in my Lincoln has only one button that requires pushing while driving (up for warmer, down for cooler) and since it requires no other adjustments, I spend something on the order of 9000% less time fooling with it than my wife does in her car - who refuses to understand or attempt to use her climate control. Honestly, I keep it at 74f and rarely touch it at all - unless she's borrowed my car and messed with it. Maybe yours is of poor design? This is also part of the same type of technology that makes are cars more fuel efficient, safer, and last much longer with much less service.

I view physical controls and knobs as the part of the device most likely to fail. Anything utilizing an sort of physical contact will eventually wear out by design. The hole required by the post for the knob lets in dust and liquids. Anyone remember the old radios with the needle the moved smoothly from left to right as you turned the knob? Very cool when I was a kid. Well to be blunt - if you do, then you also saw those very same radios (within a few years or so) with the needles off by mm's or more and often no longer moving at all and if you don't remember that - then your memory is shot! On the other hand, most electronic devices last well beyond their usefulness. Not that they don't wear out too, they do, but in my lifetime I have discarded more electronic things due to being obsolete rather than non-functioning. I will admit electronic things are more delicate and mis-use or abuse will end them in a New York minute.

Things like cell phones in poorer African countries, although not yet priced for the masses, allow communication in a place where laying the physical infrastructure is too costly, too time consuming, and environmentally damaging for anyone to undertake. Therefore, cellular technology is more available to the poor. Granted I live in L.A., but I've had e-billing on some things since the 80's and now only my local municipality (water and trash) is the only bill I have to physically look at to pay and that irritates me. Electronic statements are a god-send in my view. Think of all the paper and the pollution created in the process of making it and disposing of it that could be saved with small percentages of movement in this direction. Want to know what's better than recycling? Not creating the trash in the first place! I was audited a while back and I was able to retrieve a copy of every single check I wrote and bank and credit card statements from three years ago to today and I didn't need five large boxes to store it in. I seriously doubt that e-billing or electronic statements is any sort of cause, solution or have any impact on our current social structure or national economy.

BTW, Canada is also considered one the the world's countries without poor people because of their social policies. and you can't get something for nothing.

In conclusion: I hope no one's feelings are hurt - I'm not picking on anyone's ideals or opinions. I'm just expressing my own and I can argue about almost anything! I fully expect a downpour of argument to ensue!

[dibl]

Re: a thread for old farts...

I now feel my two cents' bursting out of me .....

I believe there is a lot of truth in what Detonate has written, regarding the quality of the human interface, and "understandability" of the old analog controls. From that perspective, they were superior to many of the "button-pushing" species, especially when the pushed button gives no feedback unless you look at a visual display. I have a recent vintage LCD clock radio that has just about the worst example of pushbutton user interface that I can imagine. You know -- push it once for hours, twice for minutes, hold down 3 seconds for FM, 6 seconds for AM, blah blah blah -- none of it apparent to the user. Every time there's a power outage or a change to/from daylight savings time, I have to pull out the instructions, because no one would ever waste brain cells remembering that trivia, and it's totally non-obvious. It has heard my full vocabulary many times. I can pretty well envision the socially inept, sleep deprived grad student who designed that interface, in a basement in Seoul, probably. It "works" perfectly, but without a cheat sheet is as useless as mammary glands on a stud horse.

And of course Oshunluvr is saying that the reliability and repeatability of solid state electronic controls is simply far beyond electro-mechanical designs. Totally true, beyond argument. I too just set my car to 72 degrees and let the computer figure out how fast to run the fan to achieve that.

I guess it depends on the degree to which you are able to relinquish a feeling of direct control, such as the clicks you got when you cranked the fan from "off" to "high". My observations suggest that some folks need that a lot more than others, to be satisfied. And it doesn't really relate to intelligence or education, as far as I can tell. I know a MSEE who apparently cannot get through a one hour meeting in any conference room without a trip to the thermostat to dork around with it.

[oshunluvr]

Re: a thread for old farts...

I'd have to agree that clocks are the worst example of electronic "progress". I love that my Lincoln has an analog clock, albeit with electronic + and - to set the time.

I think it's mostly a case of cost - people aren't willing to pay the extra for a better set of controls and how about a small capacitor so every time the power blinks for less than a second we aren't running around resetting every thing

And of course, nothing feels more gratifying than a heavy, large, hand sized knob with a soft detent (sic?) and smooth action. I had a British made NAD T760 stereo receiver in the 90's that had such a knob for volume that also turned if you used the remote to adjust the volume. Very nice! However, it cost me $1000 in 1994!

I agree also it has nothing to do with intelligence. My wife is a cardiac xray technologist and does surgeries all day, but can't understand that a thermostat is something set once, then left alone!

[woodsmoke]

Re: a thread for old farts...

I remember Trumpet Winsock from the days when our little flyover country, where people cling to their Bibles and guns because they can't move from a ruinous production economy of making things to a latte economy..... the math teacher, a woman, btw in our little dinkus school, single handedly, almost moved completely to a computer operation while the BIG schools that are so LOVED by the powers that be... sat on their tuckuses....and then later..... she went to their schools and showed them how to do the deed, and the newspapers said that they were helping her!....

But.... we all learned about Trumpet Winsock from the kids on up to the superintendant!

We used a very early form of a gradebook which the guy would not move from command line and another company..... said ok....and took it and moused it and it is now....called Pinnacle... that woman was so good at what she did that the telephone company laid a fiber optic line right past the big towns to the school. It stopped at our computer lab.

To her regret, she went with Radio Shack computers, I kept telling her commodore... the local ....Radio Shack dealer had them STACKED in a closet, hoarding them until she realized what they would do and then sold them to her for almost chump change because he had made so much money of the computers that didn't work! lol

Then.....she went a little college about halfway across the state where they were teaching how to build a computer from components, the first "towers" and learned that and had the kids building computers to replace the commodores!

What a wild ride that place was..... every other school's teachers were still lugging around the red, or green gradebooks and we left for home each night empty handed!

We had, what was it..FidoNet, using the C-128 and Qmodem to talk to other little schools because the really big schools had certain, vested interests by certain "groups" that were not about to let their members be exposed to the possibility of not being able to measure up.... they had to be dragged kicking into doing it after the little schools had done the deed.

I remember "sponsoring" a female student to the college where the teacher had learned to build computers for her to take a class on build a network from the newer components, and all the "guys" there....it had quickly seperated out that computers were a GUY'S GEEKY domain.....and they just couldn't stand it that she was a quicker learn and better at assembling the components... she had rack after rack built and tested while they were still doofing on one...

She later...............lol............... became an electrician! lol......got completely out of the building side of computers....and her and her employees wired for free a new computer lab and computerized library building after having to go to "the state" to get a waver that she was not, indeed, taking bread out of the mouths of union children, to do it.

The teacher figured out a REVOLUTIONARY WAY.....to keep porno from a computer.....

Every teacher was required, every fifteen minutes, we all had mulitple computers in each room, and two computer "labs" ....to walk up behind a student and have the student show the browser's history....and it had better not be empty! lol....

No porno in our school!

However, I completely REwired the intranet and the "net" and rebuilt and reloaded operating systems on a church school whereat I taught after retiring and guess what.... since the teachers RESPECTED the students....privacy...... ooooohhhhhh have to repsect privacy......every one of them was loaded with malware, spyware, you name it, histories full of porno sites and stuff, when I showed it to the "superintendant" and indicated just which teacher had been supervising the students he said he would take care of it. So much for the "holier than thou" of church schools, it all depends on the people....some people talk the talk and some people walk the walk.

In a blowup over closing our campus so that it could be "better managed" by taking it to another campus....guess who they kept and guess who they..."let go"! lol

But, I they got their just desserts later.... I started the English as Second Language programme at the church and the HIspanics were able to visit with their relatives etc back in their home countries fit they had access to a computer.. and yes, I can read and speak Spanish and I......checked their histories!

A guy that graduated two years before me in high school went to MIT and ended up in the AI lab and came back to the school with an "adding machine" terminal in a brief case with the old handset modem and wired it into the one phone line coming into the school, ran a very long wire to the advanced math classroom and printed out Pi to about a jillion places on the old adding machine tape, I knew then and there that "things were changing", I stll had the paper up until a decade or so ago...he later went on to work on "black boxes" for the government.

When I was first teaching I gained some small noteriety giving presentations on how to teach "inquiry" based learning and was invited to a special workshop by AT&T. There were 12 of us there and we were all given a kit to make a solar cell, we had to actually MAKE the cell using a forge in the shop, and were shown an early laser that was housed in a "chicken wire" outfit...and we were all given a "piece of plastic" like a credit card that had "popouts" for the phone numbers and the card could store I think ten phone numbers and you pushed it into a slot on a phone and it would automatically dial the number...

Here is a pic of it:

[img width=400 height=365]http://gadgets.boingboing.net/gimages/Card-Callmaker.jpg[/img]

It's certainly been a great ride for us "old farts" hasn't it!

woodoldern'dirtsmoke!

[Detonate]

Re: a thread for old farts...

While we are on this subject, does anyone know of an inexpensive digital watch with an analog display that can be set via USB? I have a Casio that is a great watch, but changing the settings is a real pita. I have to read the instruction manual every time I want to make a change, and I am presented with instructions such as "Push button A, then push button B 4 times" .etc. We change over to DST tonight and I dread having to reset my watch. This must be a real pita to folks who travel. Remember when you merely pulled out the stem and turned it a couple of times?

[Snowhog]

Re: a thread for old farts...

See Timex Datalink

[Detonate]

Re: a thread for old farts...

I'm really wanting one with an analog display, even if it is a digitally generated analog display.